Re: virus: Re: Rationality (meme make-up)
Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Mon, 17 Mar 1997 11:34:15 -0800 (PST)
> > Regardless of the fuzzyness of both concepts, their effects are
> > quite obviously real; blue-eyed parents do in fact wind up with blue-
> > eyed children, and French children wind up with French accents. If
> > a mathematical abstraction like "gene" or "meme" helps explain those
> > phenomena, why should we quibble that they don't neatly organize
> > themselves they way we would like? That just underlines the fact that
> > they weren't designed, but emerged as a result of a complex system.
>
> So does it really do us any good to look for a neural pattern that
> coresponds to a meme or is this just pissing in the wind?
The search is always valuable, we just shouldn't be disappointed by
finding them in an unexpected form. The search for the "gene" led us
to marvellous new understandings and capabilities. It just never led
us to anything we could point to and call a gene.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>
<http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>